Relationship between Work Ability Index and Fatigue among Iranian Critical Care Nurses

Nurses have always been considered as a unique working group because of the physically and mentally demanding tasks they bear at work. Such a working condition exposes them to a high risk of fatigue, which could influence their work ability. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship between work ability index (WAI) and fatigue of critical care nurses in a military hospital.

In this descriptive and cross-sectional study, 101 nurses (71 females, 30 males) of critical care units filled out both the Persian version of WAI and nurses fatigue questionnaires. The nurses were selected from three general hospitals of Tehran by cluster sampling method. The Pearson correlation test was used for investigating the relationship between two quantitative variables, and all the statistical analyses were performed by SPSS v. 21 software.

The nurses’ average age was 24.5 years old (±SD=±3.6), and the mean of work experience was 9 years (±SD=±4.13). The mean work ability of the nurses was 40.01 (±SD=±4.05), indicating “good work ability”. Fatigue was found in 46.19% of the participants, and the nurses’ fatigue was mainly of mental type (29.8%). There was a significant negative correlation (-0.57) between the score of WAI and total fatigue (p < 0.001).

The negative correlation between WAI and fatigue shows that WAI and fatigue score could be a good predictor of health and quality of work life. Therefore, identifying the influential factors of nurses’ work ability and fatigue would help to improve the work condition of critical care nurses.